This story originally appeared in Black Clock 9, released during the U.S. election season last year. As such it was written while the candidates were on the campaign trail. (I voted for Obama.) For more on Black Clock, visit their website and their blog. “Goat Variations Redux”, describing four absurdist/realistic alt-histories, is a companion piece to “The Goat Variations” published in Other Earths (as mentioned on the Emerging Writers Network today). Please note this story contains bad language and intolerable actions…

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“Recorded by geologists and physicists alike, an odd pulse passed across the world on September 11, 2001, coinciding with the President of the United States reading a story about goats to children in a Florida classroom after (during?) the tragedy in New York City. Scientists have found no explanation for the phenomenon, but here at XQ Central, we know that’s when the parallel universes started splitting off . . . . ” – From the XQ ConspiraCy Blog

2001

1: He’s wearing a black military uniform with medals on it, sitting in the chair, reading. He’s much fitter, the clothes tight to emphasize his muscle tone. But his face is contorted around the hole of a festering localized virus, charcoal and green and viscous. He doesn’t wear an eye patch because he wants his people to see how he fights the disease. His left arm is made of metal. His tongue is not his own, colonized the way his nation has been colonized, waging a war against bio-research gone wrong, and the rebels who welcome it, who want to tear down anything remotely human, themselves no longer recognizable as human. His aide comes up and whispers that the rebels have detonated a bio-mass bomb in New York City, now stewing in a broth of fungus and mutation: the nearly instantaneous transformation of an entire metropolis into something living but alien, the rate of change become strange and accelerated in a world where this was always true, the age of industrialization slowing it, if only for a moment. “There are no people left in New York City,” his aide says. “What are your orders.” He hadn’t expected this, not so soon, and it takes him seven minutes to recover from the news of the death of millions. Seven minutes to turn to his aide and say, “Call in a nuclear strike.” What will happen? What will change? He doesn’t even care, just wishes his metal arm would stop throbbing.

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Oddly, the letter/press release accompanying Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson seems more like a plea than a pitch:

The decline of general reviewing has sadly left little space for a book like Julian Comstock–that is, a book so original and vibrant with personality, it’s hard to know where it fits and what to do with it. Parts throwback adventure, post-apocalyptic sci-fi, dashing western, prophetic religious text and gloriously subversive political manifesto, [the novel] is that unique creature–an exuberant and imaginative literary creation that forces the reader to reevaluate the best books on their shelf.

The cover letter goes on to note that the novel’s only gotten one full review thus far–on Boing Boing–and the press release notes “This July [June?] Wilson returns with the type of novel nobody expected him to write.”

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For those who might be looking for more strange books to read, Steven Klotz, who was kind enough to ask our permission, has posted the recommended reading list from our New Weird anthology, along with some other thoughts on the book.

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